Tech Internship Visit #1

On Friday Sept. 21 I visited with David Coupland at Kensington Woods High School in Howell, MI. This charter school seems to be well equipped with technology items for instructor use. David is a former MACer who worked in industry before becoming a teacher, he developed and ran an after-school program with robotics and encourages students to learn about technology. Another interesting coincidence is that he did his MAC student teaching at Wayne Memorial HS with Scott Simons, who is a teacher that I've been observing this fall as well. It's a small world as they say!

During my visit I observed in David's classroom for the morning(he taught Geometry, Algebra, Physical Science and Physics). The school day on Fridays at Kensington is only a half day for students, so each class period is 40 min long. In David's room I saw him using CPS (Classroom Performance System)to review (and grade) math homework. CPS is a Jeopardy-type game with individual clickers that students use to "ring in" on multiple choice questions. He used this system to review about 8 out of 40 math homework questions; students would ring in their answers and if there were incorrect answers chosen, he would explain the correct answer as well as the reason the other answers were wrong. Some students seemed to enjoy this method of homework review. Some students that had not even completed the homework were answering by clicker and getting most answers correct. David told me that he uses the student's scores along with the physical homework page turned in to grade the homework, and that this speeds up his ability to grade homework.

During David's Physical Science class, he was covering science and religion. He used a downloaded audio clip from a Creationism website for the students to listen to so that they could interpret whether Creationism overlaps with science. David was excited about this lesson and was hoping to really engage the students with the audio clip. From my perspective, the audio clip was long-winded and complicated; it seemed to me that the students were zoning out during the audio. The graphic organizer that David had provided for the project remained mostly empty for the students. I guess to me this shows that a well planned lesson may not really engage your students. It's a tough thing to be a teacher!

I very briefly visited a second math classroom at Kensington, which has a brand new SmartBoard and TI-84 calculators that hook into the SmartBoard and the teacher's calculator. I hope to visit this second classroom along with David's room during my upcoming visits to learn more about these fancy new-fangled contraptions!

During my upcoming internship visits, I would like to get an "inventory" of technology tools available to teachers, and ask students which of these really help their learning - in particular with the SmartBoard. I would like to find out from David and other teachers which tools are most effective for their teaching practice and which require perhaps more work than the results payoff. I also think it will be fascinating to contrast the technology uses in this charter school vs. the public school system in Wayne-Westland.